10 Retro Marvel Video Games You Forgot Existed
They've been around longer than you think.
Marvel have been licensing their popular properties to game studios since 1982. From studio titans like Capcom and SEGA to Acclaim and Activision, there have been a wealth of games released on every gaming platform imaginable. The Commodore 64, the NES, the OG Gameboy, and even Arcade machines have all left behind a trail of classic retro Marvel games begging to be remembered.
So, as we enter a new generation of consoles, off the back of successful games like Marvel's Spider-Man in 2018, or the seizure inducing colour explosions of the Marvel Vs Capcom series, we should take some time to look back on how far Marvel games have come.
Make no mistake about it, not every Marvel game was a hit. In fact there are a lot of duds, many of which were tie-in games to movies (no surprise there). However, even in the misfires there's a charm to revisiting the pixel power of consoles from yesteryear, and the retro Marvel games available on them.
So for the purpose of posterity, from the humble beginnings of the 8-Bit era to the 32-bit generation, here is just a handful of retro Marvel games you forgot existed.
10. X-Men Vs Street Fighter
Marvel Vs Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds, a crossover of searing colour explosions, juggle combos, and cool ass characters fighting one another that you never thought you'd ever see. Nemesis Vs Ryu, check. Cyclops Vs Dante, check. Deadpool Vs Viewtiful Joe... what the blazes?
Now have you ever looked past the combo rainbow and wondered, where did this all start? It wasn't quite the simpler, but no less difficult, Marvel Vs Capcom 2. We have to go back further than that, all the way back to 1996. Before MvC was even a thing, we had X-Men Vs Street Fighter.
What started as an arcade game was soon ported to the short lived SEGA Saturn and a certain PlayStation 1 thereafter. It even featured the likes of Dhalsim and Charlie Nash on the Street Fighter side, and Sabretooth and Juggernaut appeared on the X-Men side. These are characters we sadly haven't seen in the most recent entries in the franchise.
From the lush character sprites, to the tag team gameplay, this was the game that started a fighting crossover revolution.